


Rum Cake Arête

by laliquey



Category: Social Network (2010)
Genre: 5 Times, Community: tsn_kinkmeme, Friendship/Love, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-01
Updated: 2013-08-01
Packaged: 2017-12-22 03:29:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,487
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/908378
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laliquey/pseuds/laliquey
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It takes a day in New York for Eduardo to figure out Mark's secret agenda. </p><p>From the kinkmeme prompt <a href="http://tsn-kinkmeme.livejournal.com/12119.html?thread=20981079">here</a>, five times Mark awkwardly puts the moves on oblivious!Eduardo and the one time where he gets it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rum Cake Arête

Mark wants to go to New York on Saturday - something about a Klee exhibition at the Met and extra credit for Art History. It's heavily implied that Eduardo will come, too.

"Do you even _need_ extra credit?" Eduardo asks, but Mark doesn't answer.

Such spartan detail is provided about the not-hypothetical-to-Mark trip that Eduardo forgets about it and fakes that he's totally on board when Mark knocks on his door at six o'clock in the fucking morning. He only has time to yank on clothes and rake toothpaste through his teeth, but Mark has showered and smells nice. A warm herbal humidity surrounds his head like a halo.

At the train station, Mark drains the prepaid Acela card issued by his mother in hopes of seeing him once in a while. "I won't be offended if you sleep on the way there," he says, and Eduardo sighs with relief and does exactly that.

*

A few clever steps around the Penn Station drop-off and they're on the Blue Line. Mark knows his way around the city and takes them to a tiny bakery that coils challah dough into cinnamon rolls so rich it's obscene. He orders three - two for now, one for later, and two gut-ripping coffees. He even _pays._

"This is almost worth the trip," Eduardo says, and then tries way too hard to be clever with a riff about the prosaic Archimedean spiral and potential market for a Fibonacci sweet roll.

"It would never sell," Mark says. "You couldn't sell a single one."

"Why not?"

"You can't detract from the middle," he says with a full mouth and all the confidence in the world. "The middle's the best part."

*

They catch a cab uptown and blow through the Met in under an hour. The textural pale color blocks of the Klees barely seem to register with Mark, and he's always a step ahead of Eduardo and rarely pauses for long. Eduardo catches him softly saying the word _Bauhaus_ to himself, stretching it to feel its shape in his mouth. Being caught instantly embarrasses him and he says, "I'm done. You can look at stuff now, if you want."

"Okay. Um..." Eduardo studies the map of byzantine gallery arrangement to plot seeing what he wants in the shortest time possible because the inevitable decline of Mark's patience must be outrun. And then something very unexpected happens.

Mark touches him.

His hand wraps around his bicep and gently pulls him out of the path of a docent in a hurry. They're standing very, very close, and it's weirdly intimate - familiar yet completely not. It's nice.

"Thanks," Eduardo says slowly. He folds up the dangerous map and decides to wing it. Much of the museum is overrun with flocks of noisy children on tour, but he's happy to find that the Asian galleries are cool and quiet. Mark follows closely and seems mildly interested but not negative, the best that can be hoped for.

"Oh." Eduardo's looking at Yongzheng porcelain and suddenly finds a little black shoe on his toes and his hand on cashmere. "Um..."

"Oops, sorry."

"No, I'm sorry." He's accidentally bumped into a girl who thinks it's her fault.

"There's so much to see...I'm all clumsy and desensitized."

"I was thinking that, too. About me, not you," Eduardo says, and he cannot believe of all the stuff in this building, she's chosen to look in his eyes.

"Well, I'm half looking for my friend," she says. "We got separated and I'll probably never see her again."

In just a few minutes Eduardo learns she's a junior at Columbia, and he also notices Mark circling around to check in on them from a distance. He glares a little harder with every pass, and by the time Eduardo has the girl's phone number, Mark's long gone and Eduardo has to call him to find out where he is.

He's in front of the Klee exhibit, looking moody and deflated.

"Sorry about that," Eduardo says.

"I almost went back to Cambridge without you."

That's doubtful, but Eduardo plays along. "I said I was sorry."

"Today is not about picking up girls," Mark says.

"What's today about, then?"

"Nothing."

"Wha...what does that even mean?"

"Nothing."

"Listen, she got separated from her friend, so I thought maybe if she showed back up there'd be one for each of us."

"I'm not sure why you'd think some random girl would be even remotely interested in me," Mark says, his speech fast and tight. "We're not exactly a matched set. And furthermore, what makes you think I'd be interested in her?

"Um..."

"You have no idea what I want, Wardo."

"You're right. I'm sorry," Eduardo says, and he truly is: that Mark's snapped back into his usual difficult self doesn't portend good things for the rest of the day, but he might be able to turn it around. "Hey, let's get lunch. I'll buy."

"It's gonna cost you."

"Fine."

Outside, Eduardo notices how brilliantly blue Mark's eyes are against the gray backdrop of the city. Mark even _smiles_ for a fraction of a second, and it's an enormous relief because it means Eduardo hasn't tanked their entire day.

*

They land at an expensive brasserie, where Eduardo pounds a glass of beaujolais to accelerate whatever's going to happen next. Mark mirrors him as he sometimes does when unsure of himself and relaxes as the wine sinks in. Halfway through a second glass, he's half as upset and his teeth are tinted purple. By dessert, he's soundly buzzed and thinks the visual of _brasserie_ is hilarious, though not as amusing as the fact that there's something called _SAVARIN_ on the dessert menu. He has to have it, and is nice enough to share.

"Look at us," Eduardo says as their two forks whittle away a cake arête. "On a date and stuff."

"Shut up, Wardo."

"You shut up. And eat that last little bit, I'm full."

"No, you."

"It'll go straight to my ass. You have it."

Mark takes the last bite and Eduardo opens the tab. It's steep, but worth it to have Mark back on track with his itinerary. Whatever in the hell it is. "Okay," he says, signing the bill with a flourish. "What now?"

"Well," Mark says with an odd little smile. "There's this place I wanna go but I don't know where it is."

His next errand is to search the Village for a rumored secret bar with no exterior sign; the cue is supposedly a red paper lantern in a third floor window. "It's totally secret," Mark says. "You can't even find anything about it on the internet or Snopes or anything. I heard about it from my cousin."

"So what's it like inside?"

"I don't know. He never went in, he just heard about it."

They wander aimlessly, looking up for the lantern. When they pass a clothing store with handsome tweeds in the window, Eduardo can't help pausing. "You should go in," Mark says. He does, and Mark waits in a black leather chair outside the dressing room and scowls at the employees.

"What do you think of this?" Eduardo comes out to model everything he tries on - gray wool flat-fronts, too many shirts, and a jacket that costs more than everything else combined.

"Good," Mark says with eyes fixed on his own cuticles. "It all looks really good."

"You aren't even looking at me."

Mark shrugs. "What? I said it looks good."

Eduardo's culling his favorites and deciding what to buy when a pale cornflower button-down shirt flops over the top of the door.

"I thought you might like this," Mark says.

Eduardo buys the pants. He also gets the shirt, because it feels like he sort of has to.

*

They never do find the secret bar, but Mark knows of another. "There's a place close to here that stocks 20 year cachaça," he says. "If you want to go."

"Fuck that, it's like forty degrees outside." Eduardo says. "Since when do you know about cachaça, anyway?"

"Since whenever. I dunno."

Mark is definitely preoccupied and clouded after that.

*

His hands are restless and tappy on the train ride home. Eduardo assumes he's engineering major shit in his head and regrets not bringing his laptop. He's been a surprisingly decent companion, though, and Eduardo decides to pull the curtain on the day. "Hey Mark?"

"Yeah?"

"Today was fun."

Mark won't quite commit to that and says nothing.

Their knees bump together for the tenth time. Cambridge is still hours away, and Eduardo wonders why Mark didn't just look up all that Klee shit online and save himself the trip.

The bakery bag appears and Mark eats the third cinnamon roll from the outside in, shamelessly licking his fingers along the way.

He wordlessly offers Eduardo the soft center comma.

Eduardo takes it and finally understands what's been going on all day.

He's being courted.


End file.
